The following interview is a conversation we had with Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $47 Million Raised to Build the Future of Autonomous Testing
Brett
Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, an autonomous testing platform that’s raised 47 million in funding. Will, welcome to the show.
Will Wilson
Hey, man. Thanks so much for having me.
Brett
No problem. Super excited. Let’s go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Will Wilson
Sure. So my name is Will. My background is, I am a software engineer. I’ve been building complicated computer systems for a very long time. I still actually do write some code, even though I’m now mostly doing sales and talking to people and stuff. But basically, this company was started largely out of the experiences that me and my Co-Founder had as software engineers. If you’ve ever written code or tried to develop a software project, you know that debugging it and finding all of the annoying problems that, you know, you didn’t anticipate they’re. There is one of the most time consuming, most taxing, and, honestly, most unpleasant parts of the whole process.
Will Wilson
And then once your thing is out there, you know, in the real world and people are using it and finding more issues that you also didn’t know were there and are also causing you problems, that gets even worse. So, you know, we’re basically like, computers are doing everything else. Why can’t computers do this part as well? And that’s. That’s what this company is trying to accomplish.
Brett
So what happened then in 2018? What was that aha. That made you say, yep, I’m going to leave this small company called Google and go out and start a startup.
Will Wilson
Yeah. Okay. So actually, I guess the story starts actually even a little bit before that. So me and my Co-Founder, Dave Scherer, were previously at a startup called FoundationdB, which made a very cool distributed database. It was like a distributed database that could run on many computers, but it also had all the asset semantics that you’re used to from a single computer, SQL database. It was really cool product, and it was really hard to build. And people have often asked us, how do we build that thing? And what was our secret weapon? The secret weapon, basically, was that we developed an extremely powerful autonomous testing system, which would just, like, try running the database in all kinds of configurations and all kinds of possibilities and do all kinds of crazy stuff to it.
Will Wilson
And by doing this really fast in parallel, it kind of found all the bugs, not literally 100%, but it found the vast majority of bugs that were ever introduced into that product. And it made developing it really easy and really pleasant because it’s like when you’ve got this amazing robot assistant that just tells you whenever you’re about to make a mistake, hey, it’s actually a lot easier to write code. That was our secret weapon. That startup got acquired by Apple in 2015, and we all went to Apple and worked on stuff there that I can’t talk about. But suffice it to say, they did not have this amazing robot assistant for some of the projects that were looking at.
Will Wilson
And I left and I went to Google and again saw that there were lots and lots of really smart people there working on really hard problems without the benefit of powerful tools that could make them radically more productive. And so that was sort of the radicalizing experience, right? These are the biggest, richest, coolest companies on earth, and they don’t have this technology that our teeny tiny startup did. Like, why is that? That seems crazy. That seems like a business opportunity. And so that’s how we got started.
Brett
Then. When did you start shipping it? When did you start having not just users, but paying customers? How long did that take?
Will Wilson
It took a few years, and that’s a lot longer than most startups. But the reason is that in order to build what we’ve built here, we had to go back to the very foundations of how computers work and change a whole lot of stuff. I don’t want to get into all the gory details. We had to write our own hypervisor that is able to run virtual machines in a completely different way than anybody else ever has. Lots of crazy stuff like that. We did actually get early design partners and paying customers as early as we possibly could. But for us, as early as possible was still a few years into the thing.
Brett
At what point did you start to really gain traction and say, okay, we for sure have a viable product here.
Will Wilson
Here, you know, okay, I think there were a few things. Like, one is, you know, we have, okay, so one thing that your listeners might not know, like, another unusual thing about the trajectory of our company was that were in stealth for an incredibly long time. Like, even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for, like, another three years, just, like, making the thing better, iterating on it, like, slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth and just, like, you know, and just waiting for, like, the right moment to, like, actually properly launch. But long before we did that, we did start to notice that our customers, like, loved it, couldn’t get enough out of it. And, like, you know, we’re putting more and more of their eggs in this basket.
Will Wilson
And then there was a magical moment when we started using it, too, and we started feeling it, like, really giving us lift and making us go faster. And that was despite the fact that at this stage, what we still had was still a very early prototype, really rough around the edges, really crappy in a lot of ways. And so we’re like, wow, if this very primitive, very rudimentary implementation of this thing that we’re building is already seriously paying rent for us and for some really big, important companies, we may actually have something here.
Brett
Talk to us about marketing. How have you approached marketing especially, obviously, as you came out of stealth, what did the marketing strategy look like and what does it look like today?
Will Wilson
Yeah, so, like, we’ve been in stealth for, were in stealth for a very long time. And so for a very long time, the marketing approach was don’t do any. And that’s not quite true. Like, we did try to, like, cultivate, like, an aura of secrecy. Right? Like, we sort of tried to make it, like, a badly kept secret that many people in Silicon Valley whispered about and that when you learned about it, you felt like you were sort of being given access to a special club. And, like, that actually worked super well. That made it sort of irresistible to a lot of people and, you know, so were sort of, like, in stealth, but not in stealth in that sense. And that was pretty cool. Once we came out of stealth, our marketing approach has been 100% content driven.
Will Wilson
You know, we’ve actually still literally never paid for an ad. We, you know, we’re working on a lot of very cool things, and they are cool to our target audience, which, fortunately for us, is people who are pretty similar to us. Right. Other developers. And so we just sort of, like, write blog posts about cool stuff that we work on and, you know, challenging problems that we’ve overcome and crazy ways we’ve used our software and, like, they go viral and people love them. We actually were benefited by a really great decision that Dave, my Co-Founder, made in the very early days of the company. So we make software that tests other software. The very first type of other software that were testing was actually Nintendo games, like classic 1980s Nintendo games. That works well for a lot of reasons.
Will Wilson
Very visual, easy to understand. When our software gets stuck and isn’t able to make progress, why that’s happening. It’s very efficient to run, it’s cheap to emulate. But then there’s this other whole benefit, which is, it’s a major source of nostalgia for millions and millions of people. And so in the process of testing our own software, we generate these videos of it playing Nintendo games and utterly destroying them and finding all kinds of crazy bugs and, like, you know, exploits and, like, sometimes, like, beating the games, right. And, like, basically, we’ve been able to produce a series, an ongoing series of these videos and analyses of how we did this with each individual game. And those have really taken off, too.
Brett
How do you make good content? There’s so much content out there in the world these days. Obviously, chat GPT has created even more content. It’s just everywhere. How do you make good content?
Will Wilson
Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to sound too glib, but I actually think it’s pretty straightforward, which does not make it easy. The straightforward answer is, number one, have something interesting to say, and then number two, say it well and think about who your audience is, and think about what kind of motivation and what kind of analogies and what kind of, you know, what. What kind of explanation is going to make sense to them. And, like, that obviously makes it sound very simple and straightforward, and it’s. It’s. It’s anything but, right? Like, like, just step one, having something interesting to say is like a thing that, you know, many people in the world are not able to pull off.
Will Wilson
But I do firmly believe that the starting point should be having something really cool that you want to share with the world, not like, how do I dupe people into clicking on my blog post, which is actually just a bunch.
Brett
Of hype, makes a lot of sense. What about the market category? How do you think about this? Is it autonomous testing? And if so, is autonomous testing going to be a new market category that’s going to emerge? Is this replacing an existing market category? How do you think about that?
Will Wilson
Yeah, that’s an awesome question. We basically believe that the category doesn’t exist yet, right. Often when we’re talking to investors or potential employees or whatever, they ask us, who are your competitors? And the answer is we don’t think there are any, but people think we’re saying that. And that’s like, haha, look how great we are. No, no. That’s like a really scary answer, right? Like if they’re like, having competitors is great. Like if you have competitors, that’s like evidence that somebody else thinks this problem is worth solving. That’s like other people who are out there educating the marketplace about what you’re doing and like creating a budget category for what you’re doing. That’s other people who are producing collateral and making the world understand what the problem is. Like, competitors are actually very useful.
Will Wilson
Having zero competitors, having a brand new greenfield area is like terrifying. It does mean that the potential upside is really big, but I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder. So, yeah, in that sense, we do think that we’re basically defining a new category. We call that autonomous testing. Autonomous testing is anything where human beings are not really involved in writing tests at all. All they’re doing is saying what their software is supposed to do and not do. And the computers are doing everything about coming up with the tests and executing them and analyzing the results, and there’s no human intervention whatsoever. There are a couple of incredibly tiny niche areas that already do something that looks a little bit like this. If you’re familiar with fuzzing from the computer security world or property based testing from the functional programming world.
Will Wilson
Like these are like tiny little specs of people doing this kind of thing, but like 99.99% of the world has never heard of it or done it. And that’s what we’re trying to change.
Brett
Is there anyone who doesn’t believe in autonomous testing? When you talk about that, are there naysayers that say, whoa, that’s not possible, it needs a human involved?
Will Wilson
That’s actually the most common objection, which is great. We saw this, by the way, with our first company, Foundation DB as well. There were naysayers who were like, that product that you’re describing is impossible. And that’s the best possible objection to get, I think, as a startup because they’re conceding that if it were possible, it would be really useful. If they thought it was useless, they would just say it’s useless. But they’re not saying it’s useless, they’re saying it’s impossible. That means we think you’re lying, but implied if you’re not lying. Yeah, I do want to buy that. So, great. Now all I have to do is convince you that I’m not lying and I’m not. So that actually makes it really easy. I basically do think this is the best possible objection, and it’s one that we’re excited about answering to date.
Brett
What do you think has been that most important go to market decision that you’ve made and take us back to the decision, how it was made and what the impact was once it was?
Will Wilson
That’s a pretty good question. So I think probably here’s the answer. Autonomous testing is an insanely broad category, and the technology we’ve built fundamentally could be used to test anything. I told you, we did a lot of our initial research testing computer games. You could also use this to test websites or test smartphone apps or test whatever. But, like, we didn’t want to go to market trying to sell the sun and the earth and the moon and the universe. Right? Like, we wanted to try and be really focused and pick one particular area to target. And, you know, and so the one we chose was specifically like, reliability and fault tolerance testing for big backend systems. And that’s like, I think that was a really good choice. We made it for a couple of reasons.
Will Wilson
One, our founding team has a background in that stuff. Two, everybody’s kind of got one. And so it’s a pretty large niche, as niches go. And then three, the existing tooling and existing solutions for this problem are insanely bad. It’s not a crowded market at all. The bar is very low, which makes it easier to blow people away with something that’s rough and prototypy. For all those reasons, we decided to start out by focusing on that area. And I think that has paid off. There have totally been challenges with it. These systems are actually quite hard to test. Well, these systems, they’re also quite slow to operate, you know, means that they’re a little bit more expensive to test very effectively.
Will Wilson
But, you know, I think in terms of keeping our go to market energy focused on a particular customer profile and keeping our product focused on a very particular, you know, problem domain, it’s really paid off.
Brett
Talk to us about the domain. I have to imagine that wasn’t an easy domain to get. How’d you get the domain?
Will Wilson
You mean how did we choose that particular one?
Brett
No. Did you have to buy it? I’m sure it wasn’t just available on Godaddy.
Will Wilson
You mean literally the URL?
Brett
Yeah, sorry, the URL.
Will Wilson
Oh, that’s so funny. Yeah. So we did have to buy it. This is sort of a silly story. Yeah. So somebody had the domain and we made them an offer and they said no, absolutely not, because they probably suspected we had a company or whatever and they asked us for a completely outlandish amount of money hen x more than were willing to pay. I tried negotiating with them and I negotiated with them and they were willing to come down a little bit, but not very much. Finally I was like, okay, fine, we won’t do it. And I instead registered like a Antithesis, I don’t know AI, don’t even remember what it was, but some other TLD and I just sort of gave up on it and started ignoring their emails.
Will Wilson
And then three months later they came back and offered it to us for the original price that we asked for. So then we got it.
Brett
That’s awesome. Yeah, I’ve found that there’s always funny stories whenever someone has a great domain like this. It was never a straightforward problem process to get it. So that’s what I like to ask.
Will Wilson
Yeah, somebody was totally squatting it. Single word English domain is definitely hard to get these days.
Brett
Yeah, for sure. That’s why we’re stuck with a IO. We tried to buy frontlines.com and it was, yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever have the budget of what they were looking for there. Now let’s talk about fundraising. So as I mentioned there in the intro, 47 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising?
Will Wilson
I think the single most important thing, honestly, is having investors who really understand what you’re trying to do and really understand what the plan is and are bought in on the plan and are well aligned with you and who understand what you want from them and like, you know, like that. And that can take many different forms. Right. Like that can take an extremely, that can be an extremely active investor who knows all about what you’re doing and, you know, is really bought in on it and is going to help you a lot or can be an extremely passive investor who never bothers you and never calls you and doesn’t read your emails, like, so long as you’re both clear that’s what you want and that’s what the plan is.
Will Wilson
You know, with our investors, we told them from very early on, look, this is a moonshot. Like, it’s probably not going to work. You’re probably going to lose all your money, and it’s going to take a very long time to find out whether it’s working or not. Like, you’re not going to know in a year whether this is taking off or not. So, you know, buckle in for the long haul because that’s what it’s going to be. And I just think, like, I think the fact that were just totally upfront about that from the very first meeting, you know, and never shied around that issue is the foundation of us having a good relationship with our investors. They really appreciated that weren’t bullshitting them on that.
Will Wilson
And then when indeed things took a long time to figure out if it was working or not, they weren’t surprised or upset.
Brett
What advice would you have for founders who are trying to market and sell to a similar audience?
Will Wilson
Like, similar to themselves, you mean?
Brett
No, similar to the audience that you’re marketing to. If they’re, if they’re trying to sell to developers, you know, what would be your number one piece of advice for that?
Will Wilson
Sure. My number one piece of advice is developers are incredibly cynical people, right? They by nature assume that everything has a catch. And so if you make your pitch, like, paradoxically, I think if you make your pitch too good, like they’re not going to believe it and they’re just going to think that they can’t spot the catch and they’re going to spend all their time trying to think of all the reasons your thing might not work well. Whereas if you just tell them what the catch is or like, tell them what the weaknesses of your approach are or like what situations you might not want to use it in or. Right, like talk a little, be a little self deprecating and a little humble and be like, look, my thing is great in this situation. It totally won’t work in this one.
Will Wilson
Which situation are you in? You know, like, I think that actually smooths the sale process tremendously.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision here?
Will Wilson
Right. The big picture is that almost all manual human software testing effort is completely eliminated and developers can produce software much more quickly. They produce much higher quality software that works better in more situations, and everybody has more fun doing it.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap up here. Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Will Wilson
They should go to our website, antithesis.com, or they should follow us on Twitter where we are. Twitter.com Antithesis.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun.
Will Wilson
Thank you.
Brett
All right.
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